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Amsterdam is not such a big city. Getting to the launchpad was only a short bus ride. The spot was good. With good traffic and lots of space for cars to stop. The sun was shining, the birds were probably singing far away from the highway… The only way for us to not get a ride would be that the Amsterdamers have no heart.Continue reading Squareholes

As you all certainly remember, the plan was that, instead of going home from Paris the same way we had already crossed Germany, we would take a pretty long detour North. For no other reason than hitchhiking a few hundred kays in the Netherland. No survey of the babe-hitchhikability of Western Europe is complete without our favourite upstuck Northern friends, right? It only takes the guts to risk death through immobility. I was up for the challenge. And Weirdo… Who cares about him anyway.

Hitchhiking was so ridiculously hard in Southern-South-America that we ended up losing quite a bit of our edge. Salvador is where we turn it all around.

Salvador, day one

We flew there from Rio. Our actual destination was Yucatan, in Mexico, but flying to Yucatan means flying to Cancun which is one of the most overpriced tourist destination in America which is very much reflected in the plane ticket prices. Or so says Cranky. So she booked a ticket to Salvador, that was like half the price. I wanted to tell her that there may be a reason why Salvador was so cheap, and that we might not like that reason. I should have. The reason is: shotguns.

There are guys wearing fake uniforms, holding a shotgun everywhere in Salvador. Bank? Shotgun-guy. Supermarket? Shotgun guy. Gas station? Shotgun guy. This has got to be the richest shotgun-fetish-country we’ve ever been to. I mean, shotguns can’t be cheap, right?

When we landed, we didn’t know that yet. All we knew was that it was already 3pm and the kids in Yucatan were waiting for us. And we owed it to ourselves to make it to the Mexican border hitchhiking all the way. Continue reading Getting dirty in Central America.

When we were done hunting kangaroos and baby turtles (another story, ask me about it and I might write a post), we went off to a black-people-place.

Forematter

You would never guess it walking down the street, but Australia is a black-people-land. The reason why you only see white folks in the street is that 1- almost all the black folks died of disease (and the occasional murder) when the white folks showed up 200 years and a bit ago ; and 2- the remaining blackies are all rounded up in black-people-only-places. A sort of hybrid between unitedstater ghetto and old-time-german ghetto.

This one started off bad, as usual. Weirdo and Cranky had managed to get themselves stranded in a town they didn’t want to go to, and the sun was already set. They started hitchhiking at night in a random direction, with the idea that getting a ride to anywhere was better than staying in this godforsaken place. It was that time of the day when people mindswitch from daylight to night lights and everything takes a menacing attitude. People probably thought that of us, and sped away. The one that stopped was driving a corrugated old car and unsurprisingly looked like a serial killer. We all got in. Continue reading Black and deadly

Weirdo and Cranky have this friend called Anna. She lives in a floating house that moves with the wind. I have gathered from listening in to their conversations that it is called a sailboat and this one in particular is called Inara, and was built from scratch by Anna’s boyfriend : Ben. They invited us for a three-day weekend to an island.

I was beginning to think that the whole day was going to suck when we got our Golden Ride. It was 14:00, we were hitchhiking since 8, and had only gotten one single respectable ride to a temple town called Chidambaram. A very noisy temple. Many people were celebrating a political victory of one kind or another by blowing up hundreds upon hundreds of firecrackers.

But the hitching wasn’t very good. People kept stopping on their motorcycle to explain to us how to get to the bus station. When we managed to get across the fact that we were hitching, they usually underwent a little culture shock and went on explaining that it was absolutely sure not to work. I really liked it when someone stopped to pick us up right at that moment. Continue reading Temple run